The bombshell leak exposing America’s vast surveillance program came from a young contractor, highlighting the risks Washington takes by entrusting so much of its defense and spy work to private firms, experts said Monday.
From analyzing intelligence to training new spies, jobs that were once performed by government employees are now carried out by paid contractors, in a dramatic shift that began in the 1990s amid budget pressures.
Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old man behind the explosive leak, is among a legion of private contractors who make up nearly 30 percent of the workforce in intelligence agencies, a staggering growth that accelerated in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The increasing reliance on contractors by the Pentagon and spy agencies has often been criticized as wasteful and possibly corrupt. But some former intelligence officers and experts warn that it also opens up the spy agencies to big security risks.
The contractors who wear a “green badge” to enter government offices may lack the ethos and discretion of career intelligence officers who wear the “blue badge,” according to John Schindler, a former analyst at the National Security Agency and counterintelligence officer.
In a series of tweets, Schindler, who now teaches at the Naval War College, heaped scorn on Snowden for leaking the details of the NSA’s surveillance of phone records and Internet traffic.
But he said it was not surprising the disclosure came from a “green badge” holder and suggested sensitive information technology jobs should not be contracted out.
“Been telling my CI (counter intelligence) peeps for years that NSA & IC (intelligence community) only 1 disgruntled, maladjusted IT dork away from disaster (esp IT contractor)…oh well,” he wrote.
Systems administrators are the equivalent of the Cold War-era “code clerks” of the 21st century, he said, as they may not hold a high rank or engage in espionage but they have access to vital information.
Most contractors are former military or intelligence officers, and America’s top spy chief, James Clapper, once worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, the same firm that employed Snowden. Another former national intelligence director, Michael McConnell, also worked at the firm before and after holding the director’s post.
The former chief of the CIA and the Pentagon, Robert Gates, who rose up through the ranks of the spy agency, has voiced concern that too much sensitive work had been farmed out to private companies.
“You want somebody who’s really in it for a career because they’re passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money,” he told the Post in 2010.
The security risks may have less to do with the US government’s dependence on private contractors and more about a younger generation’s distrust of Washington, said James Lewis, a former senior official and cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Private contracting does not in and itself pose a serious threat to keeping secrets, Lewis told AFP.
“It’s a risk because of the differing attitudes of generations,” he said.
“People who haven’t been in the federal service for a long time, who have this view of government shaped by the popular culture are probably more inclined to do this.”
He noted that the most extensive leak of US classified documents came not from a contractor but a low-ranking soldier in the US Army, Private Bradley Manning, who is on trial on espionage charges after admitting to handing over hundreds of thousands of secret files to the WikiLeaks website.
Other experts said the episode was a reminder that in the digital age, anyone assigned the task of safeguarding an organization’s computer systems has the potential power to wreak havoc.
In 2008, a disgruntled systems administrator in San Francisco locked up the city government’s central computer network containing emails, law enforcement records and payroll files. And in Australia, a hacker who had been rejected for a job application with the local council caused a waste-management system to spill raw sewage into parks and rivers.
Leak highlights risk of outsourcing US spy work
